Would YOLO be able to detect objects in "different" positions?
As you said, a CNN would be able to detect objects in different positions if the dataset contains enough examples of such cases, though the network is able to generalize and should be able to detect objects in slightly changed positions and orientations.
The term &quot;translation invariance&quot; does not mean that translating an object in the image would yield the same output for this object, but that translating the whole image would yield the same result. So the relative position of object IS important, modern CNN's takes decisions on the whole image (with strong local cues, of course).
To maximize the ability of your CNN to detect multiple orientation, you can train with data augmentation that rotate the images.
the same reasoning can be applied to partial occlusions: if there are enough samples with occlusion in the training set the network should be able to detect those ones. The network ability to generalize should also help a little when occlusions are small, and still be able to detect the object.
Some papers tried different experiment to demonstrate the robustness to occlusion and translation, for instance by looking at the network activation when artificially occluding a portion of the image with a gray rectangle, though I do not have a paper name in mind.